2) To avoid putting users' DiskStation at risk, please don't paste links to any patches provided by our Support team as we will systematically remove them. Our Support team will provide the correct patch for your DiskStation model.

I've just had it happen again - about 24 hours after Time Machine had recreated the backup following the previous failure.

As others have pointed out, the key to resolving this is to raise a support ticket with Synology when it happens and to keep following up with them until there is a resolution. Whilst it could be an Apple problem, pursuing with Synology makes more sense as if they can identify an Apple issue they'd at least have a chance of getting them to do something about it.

Personally, I wouldn't be concerned about giving admin access to Synology support. It's pretty common in the corporate world, no reason to believe they'd do anything they shouldn't - just create a separate admin login for them so there is an audit trail. Though I understand the concern and don't see why they couldn't use a remote session instead.

It seems like this is being handled by their support staff at present, would make sense for one higher level engineer to be tasked with it rather than someone different each time.

Well, I have been transferred to another Synology support representative. Based on his response below, this issue is being caused because my entire file system is corrupted due to unexpected shut downs (like power outage or disk being unplugged). So I have to wipeout my entire disk station and put everything back on; not just my time machine sparse bundle. What the heck?! I dunno where I am going to put 500 gb of data temporarily. This is the whole reason why I bought a disk station! [Please control your language]!

"I will be the point of contact for this ticket moving forward.

I reviewed your logs and see that there have been several unclean shut downs in the past. This will cause a wide range of unexpected behavior including filesystem corruption. Your sparsebundle file sits on top of our filesystem, so, if the underlying filesystem is corrupted, then of course the file containing your sparsebundle 'filesystem' could be corrupted. The fact that Time Machine failed to fsck it helps to indicate this as well.

I recommend to backup your data, verify the backup, remove the volume, create a new volume, and restore from your backups to the new volume. You may then create a new Time Machine backup with the new volume.

If you can show us that this happens with a new volume and with no unclean shut downs in the past, we will investigate it.

Unclean shutdowns of our system is a common issue, hence why you see frequent complaints, because most people think that it can be treated like a Windows PC where you can pull the power and it will most likely be OK. This is not the same for our products as it is the same as a Linux RAID server.

I guess as an IT guy for decades, I gotta weigh in here. Without access to your DiskStation, there's nothing Synology can do but guess what your problem may be. You're asking them for help, but then not giving the engineers the access they need to help you (as well as others if it turns out to be a common problem). I have no sympathy for you.

Give them the admin/root access and change the password when they're done.

FWIW, I can't even imagine running one of these units without a UPS that triggers a graceful shutdown on power loss.

I guess I would like Synology to have a little more accountability when it comes to the product they are selling. So far they have told me YOUR wireless connection is a problem and YOU corrupted your file system...in other words "this is not Synologys problem"...this is unacceptable when so many people have this problem. If Synology advertised that you can only perform a backup with Time Machine via a wired connection and you need to purchase a UPS backup to ensure synology diskstation reliability, I would have never purchased this product.

See the links below for all the other forum posts that I have found which indicate a wide spread problem. This doesn't even include the apple support forum posts on this problem:

I offered to have Synology perform a remote login session like all other IT companies can/will do...but that was not good enough apparently. How about Synology being accountable and trying to trouble shoot it via their own testing. I would think this issue could be easily recreated since so many people have the problem.

drm31078 wrote:Well, I have been transferred to another Synology support representative. Based on his response below, this issue is being caused because my entire file system is corrupted due to unexpected shut downs (like power outage or disk being unplugged). So I have to wipeout my entire disk station and put everything back on; not just my time machine sparse bundle. What the heck?! I dunno where I am going to put 500 gb of data temporarily. This is the whole reason why I bought a disk station! [Please control your language]!

"I will be the point of contact for this ticket moving forward.

I reviewed your logs and see that there have been several unclean shut downs in the past. This will cause a wide range of unexpected behavior including filesystem corruption. Your sparsebundle file sits on top of our filesystem, so, if the underlying filesystem is corrupted, then of course the file containing your sparsebundle 'filesystem' could be corrupted. The fact that Time Machine failed to fsck it helps to indicate this as well.

I recommend to backup your data, verify the backup, remove the volume, create a new volume, and restore from your backups to the new volume. You may then create a new Time Machine backup with the new volume.

If you can show us that this happens with a new volume and with no unclean shut downs in the past, we will investigate it.

Unclean shutdowns of our system is a common issue, hence why you see frequent complaints, because most people think that it can be treated like a Windows PC where you can pull the power and it will most likely be OK. This is not the same for our products as it is the same as a Linux RAID server.

This response from Synology is nonsense. Their products are advertised as being suitable for storing backups, and as such should be configured for durability by default. I know for a fact that their default configuration is not robust however, and is instead configured for performance (presumably to make the marketing benchmarks look good). I have raised this with Synology before, see my post here: http://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic ... 44&start=0

Given the default configuration of their products I am not surprised to see filesystem corruption with unclean shutdowns. I am surprised to see them blaming customers for this when it is due to the default configuration they ship.

They didn't actually say the file system was corrupt though did they? Simply that it might be. I'd ask them to provide proof that the file system is corrupt, explain why other file system errors aren't being seen and why DSM isn't reporting file system corruption.

I can't help but think they saw the unclean shutdowns in the log and thought they'd blame it on that, same as with wifi.

I am not going to format my hard disk if they can't prove it's corrupt. I am going to do a fresh time machine backup but turn off disk station hibernate. I am also going to shorten the file name for the TM sparse bundle cuz my IT buddy said sometimes that can screw things up. We shall see.

I also saw this article about apple seeding an update to lion that affects time machine (no details on what they are fixing). What I found more interesting is reading the article comments where people are complaining about the same time machine problem we are discussing.

I think my support from synology has ended...no more responses from them. I have since bought a UPS battery back up, turned off hibernate on the disk station, shortened the sparse bundle filename, and generated a new TM backup via wired connection. We shall see if this works...

As this problem is so intermittent, it is difficult to prove if this will fix it. I had another discussion with Synology tech support on the topic. And I am not making a lot of progress. So I will continue researching this on the net. Hope the above is useful!